The Old High Street

The depth of darkness is Dickensian on The Old High Street. Piss-yellow light seeps into Folkestone’s black night. I walk up the hill towards the source of the fast-food stench. The fugg rolls past, down to the sickly harbour. Old businesses are dead and dying, young ones are alive and trying to kick. Deserted laundromats and chic galleries, cheap arcades neon lit like a vision of hell, old curiosity shops, cafe bars and coffee houses, bric-a-brac and urbane cafes. The quick and the dead.

It’s like watching a dying animal give birth. Never mind the works of art in Folkestone, Folkestone is the work of art. See it now before it dies.

The Old High Street is brown ale in your cappucino, it is mud in your eye and beautiful paintings, it’s a boutique hotel readying itself for a first visitor, sometime, any time, and a Christian bookshop teleported from Old Dublin, birth control models intact and graphic.

A drunk walks behind, muttering darkly. I wonder will he attack me. He remarks on the weather, I let him slip by, he mentions the cold again. This time I answer, because he isn’t a threat, or a photo opportunity, but just a genial young man in the cold, with a few too many drinks inside.

I walk back to the car through the super-real light. Tribal teens bored and posturing, a bag lady, a corporate coffee shop. I am not sure if this is the still-born future or the dawn of something real. I’ll keep on taking my photographs, and see what happens.

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